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You might be more com­fort­able think­ing about deploy­ing math and code as your tac­tic, but I want to talk to you about the full suite of tac­tics that we use to effect change in the world. And this is a frame­work that we owe to this guy Lawrence Lessig.

The inter­est­ing phe­nom­e­non relat­ed to the RSA algo­rithm and is not shared with some of the oth­er algo­rithms is it is use­ful for both encryp­tion and for dig­i­tal sig­na­ture. That is they are two dis­tinct uses and this sin­gle algo­rithm is use­ful for both of those. And there’s an amaz­ing and some­what inter­est­ing sto­ry that then devel­ops from that.

We have basi­cal­ly lost con­trol over our net­work. All of the advances that have made our lives more pro­duc­tive, more acces­si­ble, more con­nect­ed, have fun­da­men­tal­ly dis­in­ter­me­di­at­ed our abil­i­ty to pro­tect our envi­ron­ments. The democ­ra­ti­za­tion of infor­ma­tion, of tech­nol­o­gy, of goods and ser­vices, of bank­ing, of finan­cial trans­ac­tions with blockchain etc., means every aspect of our lives has become acces­si­ble and there­fore vul­ner­a­ble.

In an envi­ron­ment where every­body can pick up everybody’s tools, we’re all weird­ly empow­ered now. And I mean kind of weird in an almost fey sense like, our pow­ers are weird, they make us weird, and they make our our con­flicts weird. It’s again that idea that our tools are inter­act­ing with our human flaws in real­ly real­ly inter­est­ing ways.